A Horse Bolted in Boylston Street

Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I fear no evil.

On the day in 1937 when Grandpa Aaron was incinerated, shabbas had arrived sunny and mild. A pity of doves gathered, pecking and muttering, sighing and cooing about the pond in Public Garden. Then G-d winked, the sun flashed, an involuntary chill coursed through creation, and a horse bolted in Boylston Street. Its cart, loaded with Diamond matchbooks and Standard Oil kerosene canisters, hit the curb. Volatile freight striked and clattered. Matchbooks ignited. Canisters exploded. The terrified horse whinnied and reared.

By this time in creation, few recalled that Nature and G-d had quarreled. Most people had forgotten that on the sixth day G-d had created man and woman in the image, bequeathing Nature to our care. Fewer still appreciated the depths of her resentment at treatment so unbecoming. That she had declared war had become the stuff of legend, passed through our clan in oral tradition. Few, including even G-d, recognized the depths of Nature's fury, or the magnitude of her powers.

By 1937, our family had long since been inundated by high waters. The windows shook then shattered in the shearing storm. The walls were lashed with driven wet. Furniture hung sodden upon soft floorboards, rotted then warped in the relentless rutilance which followed the deluge. Fecund, forgotten food festered in the ice box; we were overwhelmed. Pertinacious pests crawled from the walls and the cracks in the parquet floors. Grandpa Aaron was constant, impervious to the entropic forces decimating us, illuminating the way through the dark Valley and her towering, defunctive Shadows. Then Grandpa Arron was incinerated in that terrible conflagration. And the shadows grew tall all around us.

Yet as the sun rose upon a crowd of Christian revivalists gathered on Boylston Street that fateful shabbas morning, it felt as though Nature and G-d may have arrived at a truce. The revivalists wore long white robes which fluttered quietly around their bare ankles in the refreshing morning breeze that wafted inland from the Harbor. They carried wooden crucifixes bound with hemp rope. Their tall roods waved above the crowd. Suddenly the panicked horse and her incendiary freight were upon them. Fear exploded amidst the communion, and they stampeded onto Charles Street, which was already full of weekend visitors.

Dads in straw hats and linen trousers. Little boys in short pants and sisters in summer dresses. Mothers pushing perambulators. Alert beagles in vibrant coats sampling urgently the meaty air.

The weekend visitors were now trapped between the demonstration, the conflagration, and the street vendors there to serve them. A Portuguese man selling lemon ices from a hand cart, a dove perched upon his shoulder. A Chinese fortuneteller in colorfully embroidered silk sitting before a card table, and so forth.

And Grandpa Aaron in his old taxi, borrowed for the day, standing at the light. Haggling with a guy over a roll of beautifully painted old maps.

The terrified horse and flaming cart burst urgently upon the scene. The cart swung wildly, careening on two wheels, flailing flaming exploding freight. Striking the card table, sending brightly lacquered clay amulets bouncing and breaking under panicked feet, splitting and spitting, cracking like fractious firecrackers at a New Year’s parade.

Incontinent wheels caught up a revivalist in the crowd, a flaming matchbox igniting his robe. With superhuman strength, he tore himself free. He crashed into the map vendor, who was leaning into the passenger side of Grandpa Aaron’s cab, consummating the deal. The vendor spun around in fury. The dove winged up from the street vendor's shoulder, knocking his cap with its flustering feathers. A canister exploded in the flaming cart, sending shrapnel and matchbooks into the crowd. The trader caught fire, the flames devouring the arsenic-laced paint in his old maps, which ignited with such ferocity that Grandpa Aaron’s cab, and then the old man himself, were engulfed in flame.

SMOLDERING SILENCE.

It had grown dark. The atmosphere wore the weather like a mournful obligation. A pugnacious Atlantic breeze driving drizzling wet into the huddled people and their tumbled-up things. Detritus cold sopping in the street and on the grass. Survivors damply sniffling, wiping away tears with soiled sleeves. Listing piles of creation extending even to the edge of the pond in Public Garden. The pity had wandered away, quietly shifting in the cold damp. The birds muttered and moaned.

When search and rescue crews reached the scene, still chasing the panicked horse and flaming cart, they discovered several casualties in the cold wet dark, including the map merchant and a beagle, lying trampled in the street. The maps were barely a whisper of arsenic-laced haze, clinging to the smoldering headliner of Grandpa Aaron’s ancient cab, the old man a skeleton within a carbonated shell. Tall roods, bound with hemp rope, lay here and there upon the sidewalk and the street. Some doves huddled in the nearby lawn, wet beading upon their bright feathery coats.

After the light burned out in Grandpa Aaron’s eyes, the Natural forces setting upon us grew still more excited with the scent of decay. Cyclonic winds whipped biting, spitting dirt and freezing rain into our eyes; it froze in our hair. It hated us. We screamed against Nature and Nature screamed back. The gathering pace of dissolution accelerated parabolically, like the chart at the top of an epidemiologist’s clipboard.

Grandpa's taxi medallion alone survived his tragic demise, leading the police officer to my parents’ door. End times had transformed the apartment. No cooling breeze circulated within the sealed and covered windows. The floor and table lamps had long since gone dark. The mice had eaten through first one cord and then another. The ceiling lamps blinked out in turn; their wiring devoured. The apartment was now shrouded in eschatological darkness. Pots and pans stood unwashed on the stovetop. A sniffing snout, sampling the defunctive atmosphere, gleamed in a column of dusty street light. Elegantly articulated claws created a Chantilly pattern in the congealed fat cold in a skillet. Floor length cornflower curtains lay piss-stiff against sitting room windows. Dirty bed sheets, rodent shit. Nature.

Mother lay in dirty dusk, wrapped in unwashed bedsheets, inured to the marauding infestation. Father in his undershirt at the kitchen table. Tallow candle spluttering before a general ledger and checkbook. Neat stacks of bills and receipts. Father’s scratching pen. Mother shifting in her bed. The only sounds of G-d’s creation in the wake of Nature’s conquest. Electricity had been cut. Phonograph long since shut. Nature’s scraping, clawing and insistent vocalizing - in the walls, along the floorboards, beneath the furniture, on the stovetop, sipping water from dripping faucets, nibbling ground beef fallen from Father’s lonely mastication - filled every other auditory space.

The sharp rap on the door startled Father from his ciphering. He was reluctant to allow the officer in, but he insisted. Trying to project a sense of normalcy in the face of overwhelming defeat, Father offered to take his drenched coat and sopping wet cap, but the officer refused. Father cleared a space on the sofa for the officer to sit, but he said he preferred to stand, the wet puddling the mat and parquet floor about his galoshes.

‘Are you Abraham Baron?’

‘I am.’

‘Do you own medallion number 1-7-6?’

Father consulted his GL, where he kept a careful list of his medallions. He knew already that 1-7-6 was Aaron’s old medallion. Yet he consulted his careful list.

‘There has been an accident. I need you to come with me.’

‘Is the driver ok?’

‘There was a fire. We are hoping you can give us some information regarding next-of-kin.’

Father sank into a soiled velveteen chair, his balding head in his hands. ‘Oh no.’

‘Abe - is someone at the door?’ Mother demanded from the bedroom.

Father didn’t answer. He held his balding head in his hands, quietly whispering, ‘Oh no.’

Mother appeared, clutching the filthy bedsheet like a tichel about her head, some curly strands of graying auburn falling before her eyes and ears.

‘Ma’am,’ the police officer said.

‘Abe, what is the matter?’ Mother demanded.

‘It is your father, dear.’

‘What has happened to my father?’

‘There’s been an accident.’

‘The deceased is related to you then?’

‘Deceased? What has happened?’

Mother sank into the rodent shit and piss-stained floorboards, with a quiet moan. It was the keening of a woman utterly defeated by Nature and ignored by G-d. It was the soft, defeated sigh of a woman accepting the pain into her body, because to resist only multiplied the agony and because she had long since lost the will to resist, or the strength to bear further pain.

Grandma Minnie and I were sitting at her little kitchen table, one floor above, sharing a cigarette and watching the rain refracted through the streetlights outside her window. The only light illuminating she and I was the occasional flashing over the Harbor, and the smoldering tip of the cigarette we passed between us. The only sounds the rain, the wind, the occasional thunder. We were both startled when the telephone rang. Grandma never used the telephone, so I answered.

‘Lucy, something terrible has happened, I need you to bring your Grandma down here right away,’ Father said. ‘She is going to need to go out of doors with me, so please help her to bundle up.’

Grandma seemed to understand what had happened even before I hung up the phone. We bundled her downstairs. Father and Grandma followed the officer into the night. I stayed with Mother, who had returned to her filthy bed. I pulled on some elbow length rubber gloves I found under the sink. Within a scene of utter devastation, lighted only by Father's guttering tallow candle, I set to work washing some dishes in the sink and on the counters. I felt the rodent infestation watching me expectantly from the shadows. Outside the sealed kitchen window, lashed by the driven rain, a dove alighted on her cill, cooing expectantly into a streetlamp.

Although Grandpa’s death was shocking, Grandma seemed to recognize that G-d winked. The mood changed. The conflagration created space for something, however small.

She used his shiva to prepare. She prepared through mundane and prosaic activities. The entire time it rained. While we cataloged all the stuff she and Grandpa had collected over 50 years and two continents, the rain slapped constantly against her windows. She directed us in the appropriate dispensation of every item, and all the while it rained.

I think Grandma was satisfied with her work, for when we woke on the seventh day she had died, and her death mask was serene. There was no surprise or horror. The shiva simply continued. I felt her there with us while we crated up her stuff and distributed it as she had directed.

The clouds eventually parted. We were under a special sign. Grandpa’s conflagration created a twinkling light. Grandma used his shiva to gather up their possessions. Her death transmogrified them into a wispy halo shimmering G-d’s bright. She invited the sunlight into us. She made herself an interstice in the squall. We sheltered there, refugees in her tender vessel. We huddled among the doves, who cooed mindlessly into nothingness.

We had not escaped the squall. The relief was small, the sign pathetic. Yet G-d did wink. Grandma died in peace. The pity did coo, however idiotically, in the void.